Margarete Hahner at Track 16
Took a walk around Track 16 with Sean Meredith and learned a bit more about Margarete Hahner and a few of her works currently on display in the gallery.
So this is a piece by Margarete Hahner, a German painter from Bamberg, Germany. A small town that's full of old churches and breweries. It’s about the main things that make the town run. She works in oils, and this piece is called Tableau Vivant. The title comes from this tradition of what's called a living tableau, a living painting. In the tradition there would be backdrops and sometimes even props. Instead of a figure in the painting, the figure would be posing with the backdrop and the painting of course. The tradition goes on here in Southern California, in Laguna. Every summer they have an event called the Pageant of the Masters, where they have themes and scripts with lots of volunteers who come back year after year, spending their summer getting in makeup and costume every night to get positioned in. All of these tableaus are painted and reproduced.
Margarete’s painting, Tableau, being an oil, you can see where the paint is really built up and thick. It almost looks like dried flowers. Margarete often likes to use slightly dried oil paint, kind of the skin from her palette that she almost scrapes up and then applies flat onto the piece. Gives it that kind of crusty, dried up feel to it.
Bamberg Door, and like I said, she's from Bamberg, Germany, a very Catholic town. A lot of her work is very influenced by Catholicism that she grew up with, reaction to it and how it's sort of internalized in the age she is now. So this piece, Bamberg Door, which is, you know, painted much more simply than the rest of the show.
Bamberg, Germany
This is the door to a brewery, the way a number of the breweries and churches in Bamberg are set up are where these will be, their facades of the buildings. Then there'll be side doors right in between the two buildings. Monks at the end of the day would go straight out the side door of the church and right into the side door of the brewery. The church would be right next door, and they just have to, build the doors right across from each other. Monks could pretty much have the fastest access to the brewery possible.
The above work is definitely indicative of where Margarete comes from in a way. She's a German painter who spent a lot of time living in Berlin and was going to school in the 70s/80s period. A lot of her work is infused with surrealism, absurdity, juxtapositions, crudeness, mixed in with elegance and symbolism. They touch on kind of everything and they're definitely out of the German style that can be indicative. Martin Kippenberger and many others are of this idea, you know, purposefully throwing out rules, having uncomfortable juxtapositions.
In this piece, there's definitely a lot of, I could almost feel like Freudian aspects. I can feel surrealist aspects as well. The piece is called Park, and so it's easy, sometimes you don't see it right away, but it's easy to see this pond with a fountain in the middle. I always figured these bones to be the gate or the fence. In some way, so are these orbs, double orbs? Are they just sci fi? Are they scientific objects similar to the idea of these almost anatomy skeletons that might be in a school, or are they hourglasses? It's hard to figure exactly what they are. But there's a lot unsaid in Margarete’s work that you know, maybe, is to remain mysterious.
Thank you again to Sean for taking us through the world of Track 16. See Heimlich by Margarete Hahner through April 15. And be sure to see Margarete in conversation with Antonio Beecroft, Thursday, April 6 at 7pm.
More info here:
www.track16.com
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